Pick your poison
Have you ever been to a party and been given the option of smoking a joint or drinking alcohol? In choosing, which would you think would be more dangerous or detrimental to your health?
If you are the person who typically would choose to drink, you are in for a few more issues than your peers who choose to smoke marijuana. Let’s say you start playing drinking games with your friends and you end up drinking a lot very quickly. Your body is not able to metabolize all that alcohol as fast as you take it in and it could immediately have some serious effects on your brain and your body. Alcohol is basically a poison, and your body’s response to ingesting too much is to get it back out, and you will be spending the rest of the night cuddling the toilet.
After drinking a bit, you will need to take a few trips to the bathroom, and if you end up vomiting, you lose a good amount of fluids from your body along with the alcohol, causing dehydration and a terrible hangover the morning after. Since alcohol is a depressant, it lowers the levels of serotonin in your brain and it can also cause anxiety. In the long term, binge-drinking causes psychological damage and leads to depression and anxiety disorders, along with liver disease and heart problems. The annual death toll of drinking is 88,000 deaths per year from alcohol poisoning and 30 percent of those deaths are from drunk driving.
If you are the person who would chose to smoke marijuana, you have significantly less to worry about in terms of health detriments. After smoking for a while, you have taken a lot and you begin to wonder if you have had too much. Rest assured, your brain’s cannabinoid receptors release a chemical that will prevent you from getting too high. There has never been an overdose or any deaths directly associated with smoking marijuana, because to actually overdose you would need to smoke more than your body weight in bud. Before you even make a dent in that mountain of herb, you would fall asleep or become distracted by the temptation of food or entertainment.
However, the negative side effects of smoking higher amounts are feelings of paranoia, dry mouth, “the munchies” and temporary impairment of memory. Some people argue that smoking marijuana can also lead to lung cancer or smoking one joint is worse for you than smoking 20 cigarettes. In actuality, the active compounds in marijuana have been proven to slow down and even reverse cancer cell reproduction and it can reverse the effect of cigarette smoke on a person’s lungs.
The morning after smoking marijuana, the usual smoker won’t feel any sort of “hangover” other than maybe still having a dry mouth and dry throat.
Now, which do you think would be more dangerous or detrimental to your health?
Chris Lyman • Oct 26, 2015 at 8:42 am
Good points. However if you watch how media portrays drinkers vs. smokers, you would believe that all smokers lay around playing video games and cramming their faces with sweet treats, whereas drinkers are successful, happy, active, great looking, etc.. Social conditioning at it’s finest. The reality is far different, as you know. 80 to 90 thousand people die annually from the effects of excessive drinking, (far more than from gun violence) and innumerable innocents are victims of physical, verbal and mental abuse by drinkers. Not to mention all the bad choices made while under the influence. The cost to society is huge, but hey if you follow media you wouldn’t know that, as all the drinkers are portrayed as having a great time! Media doesn’t show the dark side of drinking, since alcohol is our government approved drug of choice, for better or worse.